Party-less Crist faces harsh reality

WEST MIAMI, Fla. — First, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was supposed to be the Republican nominee for Senate. Then he seemed on track to be the de facto Democratic candidate. Now, following Rep. Kendrick Meek’s victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, the Republican-turned-independent governor is finally and unmistakably a man without a party.

With billionaire Jeff Greene’s quixotic Senate campaign officially dead and buried, most of the Democratic donors, officials and activists who would have bolted the flawed real estate mogul for Crist will be forced to stay with Meek. The state GOP establishment already has disowned Crist. And because he’s standing in between Meek and Republican nominee Marco Rubio, Crist is taking fire from the two sides he’s attempting to bridge.

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Rubio is coming after him from the right in an attempt to effectively create a second Democratic primary that will leave the party split.

“I have two supporters of the Obama agenda,” the former speaker of the state House said of his rivals before voting at his precinct here Tuesday.

And Meek, hoping to persuade Democratic voters to remain loyal to their nominee, is reminding his own party base of the conservative positions Crist took in the not-so-distant past.

“Gov. Crist is not a Democrat,” Meek said in an interview over the weekend.

Noting his own consistency on issues like abortion rights, offshore drilling and Social Security privatization, Meek said of Crist: “His track record doesn’t speak to Democratic values.”

All of which leaves Crist in the position of having to perform Houdini-like marvels of contortion to find a large enough space in the political middle to keep his independent bid on track.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Crist said his values place him squarely in his state's political mainstream.

"If Floridians want somebody on the far right, they have a candidate, and if they want somebody on the far left, they have a canddidate," said the governor. "But if they want someone in the common-sense middle, I'm their candidate."

He added: "I may be a man without a party, but I'm not a man without a people."

Crist very likely would have had more of those people poised to support him in November today had Democrats not nominated Meek, however.

While the Miami congressman's primary opponent, the baggage-laden Greene, would have given Democrats easy cover to support Crist in droves, it’s far less likely that core liberal voters will abandon a sitting member of Congress with a solidly liberal voting record, deep roots in the state’s African-American political community and the enthusiastic support of former President Bill Clinton.

That means that for the final two months of the campaign, Crist will have to chart a narrow, largely untested course between both parties. He’ll have finite financial resources and few outside allies who can ride to his rescue. In short, he’ll have to be a political one-man band, relying ever more on his skills as a sunny, relentless and elastic campaigner who bends to where he thinks the people, and victory, are found.

"It’s difficult in terms of the infrastructure, there's no question about it," he conceded.